03 october 2020
01:00
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In case of suspicion of fraud, the tax authorities and the court are given faster access to the balance of Belgian bank accounts. That is what the seven parties of the Vivaldi coalition have agreed.
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In case of suspicion of fraud, the tax authorities and the court are given faster access to the balance of Belgian bank accounts. That is what the seven parties of the Vivaldi coalition have agreed.
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“That is why the bank balances of Belgian account numbers will be transferred to the CAP.” That short sentence is somewhere halfway through the formation memorandum of the De Croo government and raises questions. The CAP or Central Contact Point is a register of Belgian bank accounts that the National Bank has kept since 2014. The banks must annually submit the account numbers and information about the holder of the account to the CAP. The tax authorities and the court can obtain information from this if there are suspicions of fraud and the taxpayer does not provide a satisfactory answer to questions. In a next step, the tax authorities can conduct a bank investigation and inspect the accounts of a suspect at the bank.
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Efficiëntiemaatregel
One step is now skipped in the coalition agreement. From now on, the banks will also have to transfer the balances of the Belgian accounts to the CAP every year. In government circles there is an efficiency measure with a psychological effect. Together with the ending of the tax regularization in 2023, this should encourage taxpayers to quickly find their dirty money. The De Croo government therefore has great ambitions: combating fraud should yield an extra billion by 2024, which, according to specialists, seems quite utopian.
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Werner Heyvaert, tax lawyer at AKD Benelux Lawyers, thinks the government is targeting taxpayers who have only partially regularized their dirty money. “Some taxpayers have regularized the proceeds of black capital – interest and dividends – in recent years, but not basic capital.”
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A property register will never pass with us.
Egbert Lachaert
Chairman Open VLD
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Tax specialists also suspect that the expansion of the CAP may be the stepping stone to a property register. According to Heyvaert, ‘all information that is passed on to the CAP can be used to draw up a wealth register’. Anton Van Zantbeek of the Rivus office also calls the CAP ‘the seed’ of a property register. The fact that the new government has plans to have the strongest shoulders contribute more makes that suspicion stronger.
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International data exchange
Open VLD, the party of Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, strongly denies that this is the stepping stone to a property register. ‘That will never pass with us,’ says chairman Egbert Lachaert. ‘We only allow accounts to be viewed if there are strong indications of fraud. Anyone who has problems with that must also say that he does not want to collect the taxes correctly. ‘
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According to our information, the socialists wanted to go further and give the tax authorities access to income for the year in question. For Belgians with accounts abroad, the tax authorities already have access to accounts thanks to the international exchange of data. That the tax authorities can find out more about foreign than domestic accounts is illogical according to the socialists.
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In the negotiations between the PS and the N-VA, a conversion of the Common Reporting Standard – an international agreement to exchange the financial data of foreigners with the countries where they have to pay taxes – into Belgian law was on the table. In the Vivaldi talks, the liberals blocked that.
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